Opinion Mining and Social Networks: A Promising Match

In this paper we discuss the role and importance of social networks as preferred environments for opinion mining and sentiment analysis especially. We begin by briefly describing selected properties of social networks that are relevant with respect to opinion mining and we outline the general relationships between the two disciplines. We present the related work and provide basic definitions used in opinion mining. Then, we introduce our original method of opinion classification and we test the presented algorithm on real world datasets acquired from popular Polish social networks, reporting on the results. The results are promising and soundly support the main thesis of the paper, namely, that social networks exhibit properties that make them very suitable for opinion mining activities.